Being born Canadian bestows advantages most of us take for granted. I’ve been thinking about my birthright a lot since my AirB&B guests arrived. Let me explain.

A and Z flew from Istanbul on May 28 and eagerly entered my house with the luggage you’d expect of a 10 week holiday in Canada. A made a b-line for the sofa unzipping the hoodie that shrouded her belly, and released her swollen feet and ankles from their sup-hose casings. From social media, I know A is usually a slim, glamorous 30 year old, and, like all her contemporaries, is as comfortable with being photographed and as she is to share the images with the world. That evening, though, she had the grim look of determination that pregnant women have sported for millennia. I kept the pace of the house-tour slow, as A gamely climbed the stairs despite being in some degree of discomfort from the trans-Atlantic journey. Through their interpreter/friend, J, I inquired when the baby was due.

So I’m commuting by car to work these days and kind of liking it. Driving is an unlikely thing for me to enjoy. You’d think hurtling around in potentially lethal weapons would require a trust in fellow humans which, I’m ashamed to say, I often lack. This comes out when I’m on a subway platform, worrying that someone will push me onto the tracks or when devilled eggs are served at a picnic and I think about salmonella.

Why do I share the collective faith that all drivers have in each other?

The wing of dad’s homebuilt airplane is stripped of its skin and lies upside down across two sawhorses. It’s what I see upon opening the door to the place where dad spends his time when he isn’t in the barn, eating, or sleeping. Even as a 12 year old, I know this workshop is where he recharges his farmer’s battery. He peers down at the exposed wooden bones of the wing’s anatomy like he’s the popular TV coroner in Quincy M.E. Each wingtip points down towards the plywood workshop floor in the gentle curve that gives the wing aeronautical lift when it’s right side up and supporting the fuselage. I’ve walked on the other side of that wing, being careful to stay on the black reinforced part as I clambered into the cockpit for our many after-supper flights. We’d take off from the grass landing strip in front of our farmhouse just to take a look around the countryside. But now the Jodel is grounded due to a little mishap. No-one was hurt, thankfully, but while the damage it sustained when it hit the ground a little too hard on a landing isn’t visible to me, the plane’s not currently flightworthy. For dad, it’s minor, just like cutting off the end of his finger is “just a scratch," and being laid out with sciatic “just needs a little chiropractic adjustment.” My talent for overreaction in my adult years could well be a response to his predisposition for the understatement.

After nearly three years of lawyering from home all the while resisting subtle pressure from colleagues to re-enter the downtown core more regularly, I am rediscovering the value for me of working together in my new job. And trust me, admitting I was wrong is not easy.

If you knew me in 2020, you know the loss of normal life associated with COVID shutdowns ripped the scab off my barely healed grief-wound. Anxiety and paranoia had me walking in traffic rather than being close to humans on sidewalks.* I decided - wrongly as it turns out - I could live and work all on my own, without needing regular social contact. I stayed at home according to the rules of the day. When the formal stay-at-home orders lifted, I railed against what seemed like foolhardy government decisions. Too soon, I said to anyone who would listen. And I continued to work full time from home, quite certain I was personally not missing anything.

“She’ll keep them apart,” he’d just assured me. I rolled my eyes. Sure, I’d never owned a dog, but it seemed extraordinarily risky to leave an unspayed eight year old female with a 18 month old unfixed male under the supervision of a 21 year old human, even one as responsible as my then-boyfriend’s daughter, Alexa. But that is what Jack was doing as we left for our first trip to Poland 12 years ago.

Mom ran along beside me with one hand on the seat as I gathered speed on my blue two-wheeler with the chrome fenders and the wire basket. No training wheels - this was the 70s. The summer before, I was still using my trike with its bike front wheel and two tiny ones at the back, tippy as hell but fun in its own way. But this bike felt like the big-league, one step closer to a drivers licence. Country living made you covet that at a much younger age.

“How much have you practised?” my piano teacher would ask at our weekly after-school lesson, her tone hopeful.

“Yeah, sorry, I just never got around to it,” I’d reply, casually, like any other teen who was not paying for her own lessons. (Ten years later when I began studying cello, I’d still show up unprepared but much more wracked with guilt, it being on my own dime.)

Grimacing, Mrs. Alton would go over the previous week’s piano lesson yet again. I always left her place with good intentions, but practising Beethoven sonatas didn’t have the allure of getting up to no good with my friends or sitting comatose in front of Dallas.

For eight years, I’d boarded that commuter train before 8 weekday. It spat me out at Union Station amid thousands of others, distinguished from ants fleeing the anthill only by our backpacks, briefcases, and Starbucks clutched firmly in hand. I headed northwest, striding with purpose to my office at Queen and Richmond. I’d earned my stripes as a Torontonian and accordingly, looked down my nose at any early-bird tourists roaming about looking for breakfast. I’d worked downtown since 1989, and lived there too for 21 years. This was my terrain. Nine hours later, I’d push my way into the packed return car, jockeying for position to exit with the flood of commuters disgorged from the train at suburban Weston. We all either then ran/walked down the ramp to join the car commuters going further out from the core, or, like me, walked into the community thinking about what to have for dinner. That was full attachment.

If you thought I seemed overwrought in Grief Lives in my Basement, wowza, the cumulative impact of the last 20 months has left me emotionally stalled at the intersection of euphoria and decision-fatigue.

Regular readers will know the story,* but in August 2021, in my gazebo fuelled by perhaps too much wine, and with the encouragement of two similarly boozed-up housing developer friends, I cooked up a plan to reduce my footprint, move without moving, create a unit of housing, and replace my income from practising law with rental income from my house.